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8/31/09

The Jakarta Post: Love and coffee: Two things I could not live without - by Janet DeNeefe

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Love and coffee: Two things I could not live without - by Janet DeNeefe

Coffee in Bali has always been synonymous with chatting and no subject is taboo when armed with this precious brew. It opens the debate on all subjects from lovers to loans, from religion to rice fields. It has even been said to have played a part in world revolutions: Che Guevara drank coffee. For more than half a millennium, the fabled story of coffee as a beverage has been far more than just a drink. The dark liquid coaxed from the roasted beans of the Coffea Arabica tree still commands the attention of corporate executives, world leaders and an ever-increasing number of the global population. Legend has it that coffee was first cultivated in Ethiopia 1000 AD and then made its way to Yemen where members of the Sufi sect began consuming it regularly.

As with so many exotic ingredients in Bali, coffee is not native to the island. It was introduced to Indonesia by the Dutch, who transplanted - or smuggled - the trees from Yemen and cultivated them in the highlands of Java in the 1700s. After all, colonialism was always about trade and monopolizing world commodities. Sound familiar? By 1732, Indonesia was producing around 2.3 million pounds of coffee annually. It eventually became the drink of the masses. At a later stage, coffee trees were planted in Singaraja and Kintamani. Warung kopi were the original coffee houses for locals. In the early days, there was a certain quaint rustic charm about them, a touch of Balinese bohemia that became even more poetic at night under the light of a kerosene lamp. You could plan a revolution there, plot any kind of mayhem or discuss all things political. It was like a primitive Internet cafe or CNN with daily news updates, fired with a certain kind of liberalism that safely existed beyond the palace walls.

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